The alt solves better and is mutually exclusive. Socialism focuses on empowering workers, not just making more of them. That might include a full employment program, but conflating that with the aff idealizes capitalism while preventing analysis of their actual effects.

Anti-capitalist organizing should not be based on objective or idealistic rationality in traditional (capitalist) economic terms, but based on an understanding of how the market exerts power in the interest of the bourgeoisie. Worker wages don’t necessarily rise in response to a shrinking labor market because capitalism attempts to adapt with long-term power as its priority. Business owners will underpay their work force and deny them benefits even if they end up understaffed — because it preserves an essential power dynamic. They would often rather close than capitulate to workers. If you understand market rationality only as immediate, corresponding responses to economic changes, you fundamentally misunderstand capitalism. The market is rational only in a macro-Marxist sense — it consistently acts with preservation of capitalism (and capitalists’ self-interest) as its motivation.

Socialists should be confronting capital and the political systems that submit to and enable it. We shouldn’t spend time guaranteeing a job that may or may not increase private-sector job wages but, at the very least, tie the minimum wage to inflation and force the private sector to pay more — and even this is only an extremely tepid reform! We should not endorse a proposal that provides healthcare through a federal job, when we could instead continue the fight for healthcare completely de-linked from employment. And we — the workers — should build workplace power by increasing union activity to protect workers against the reduced hours and layoffs that inevitably follow rising wages.

Waiting for the market to correct in favor of the worker is a foolish endeavor rooted in capitalist thinking, and further exposes a federal job guarantee as a reform based in capitulation, not transformation. There are plenty of reforms that genuinely build worker power as we build a path towards a complete restructuring — Sanders’ job guarantee, without a clear plan to decommodify services, is not one of them.

Progressives and leftists have used Sanders’ proposal as an opportunity to debate the concept of a federal job guarantee, but fail to engage with the political context in which such a program would operate. There is a world of difference between a socialist job guarantee under a democratic government and a capitalist job guarantee under our existing (undemocratic, imperialist) state. It is important not [to] mistake criticism specifically directed at a bourgeois job guarantee for a condemnation of an eventual planned economy featuring a similar program. That redirecting of discourse idealizes the oppressive, volatile state that currently exists and fails to adequately analyze the potential success of the reform.

We have seen job guarantee programs in the past, which were introduced during capitalist crises. Progressives point to past, temporary successes in alleviating working-class suffering as proof of the program’s validity, but fail to question why we’re back in the midst of a capitalist crisis. These supposedly radical reforms are non-transformational! The positive effects are finite without changing power dynamics.

We need people building our infrastructure, urgently, in the face of a changing climate. There is vital work to be done in many sectors. But we will ultimately fail at securing a sustainable future if those projects (and “jobs” — though in a socialist state it would not be wage labor) are contingent on the ever-volatile support of those in power. We’ve witnessed major policies attacked and dismantled after a change in administration, and most of us are tired of repeating the cycle.

The proposed capitalist federal job guarantee does not change economic or political power dynamics — it keeps the working class in the position of petitioner. Wrestling power back from the bourgeois state, and dismantling the capitalist system, has to precede anything resembling true liberation. Socialists need to stop selling the working class on scraps by labeling them “radical,” and instead agitate it to the point of fundamental change.